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A problem with the hydraulics lines that control the wing and the daggerboards vexed Emirates Team New Zealand Sunday, allowing Luna Rossa to win the second race of the Louis Vuitton Cup finals uncontested. The Italians evened the challenge series 1-1 after the first of two scheduled races.

The Kiwis showed no ill effects from Saturday’s near pitch-pole and had a lead of about 400 meters when they encountered trouble on the third of five scheduled legs. They had a couple of slow tacks, then stopped altogether, unable to get the hydraulics working properly.

Team New Zealand won the start and seemed well on their way to taking a 2-0 lead in the series.

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Tom FitzGerald is the Stanford sports beat writer for The Chronicle. In more than three decades at The Chronicle, he has covered the 49ers and Raiders and a wide variety of other sports, including auto races. Among the many momentous games he has covered were the 49ers' victory over Dallas in the 1982 NFC Championship Game, which featured "The Catch'' by Dwight Clark, and the U.S. hockey team’s 1980 Olympic upset of the Soviet Union in Lake Placid, N.Y. At the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, he rode the bobsled run with members of the U.S. team for a first-person story. In 2012 he rode on Russell Coutts’ Oracle Team USA catamaran for another first-person story during the America's Cup World Series. In 2014 he rode with IndyCar legend Mario Andretti in a racecar at Sonoma Raceway, hitting speeds of more than 150 mph.
For 15 years he wrote a popular sports humor column called “Top of the Sixth’’ (later named Open Season). He lives in Martinez.